Barack Obama and the Lessons of Antiquity: Bruce Thornton
In one of the keynote addresses from the Hauenstein Center conference, Bruce Thornton applies lessons taken from the reign of Philip II of Macedon:
Emperors of Rome: Vespasian
Adrian Murdoch brings the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’ to an end with a rather competent fellow: Vespasian: Emperors of Rome
This Day in Ancient History: pridie kalendas martias
pridie kalendas martias Amburbium — a ‘moveable feast’ which may or may not have actually been held on this day, but does seem to have happened near the end of February. A sacrificial procession was led around the boundaries of the city as a rite of purification. 509 B.C. — During a major attempt by [...]
Suspicious Apollonia Drachma Sale?
As is my wont, this a.m. I woke up early to put together my Explorator newsletter and, as is its wont lately, my Internet connection was down. So I flip on the TV and am idly flipping through channels when I hit the Canadian version of the Shopping Channel, which had its ‘coin show’ on. [...]
The ‘Other’ Elgin Disputes
There’s not much ClassCon in this one, other than the connection to the guy who did that thing with those marbles — but there’s some CanCon, and so we’ll jump at the opportunity to mix Canadian history with Classical, no matter how tenuous the link. In any event, the guy at the centre of this [...]
Fiddling While Libya Burns?
Watching the events in Libya this week, it’s kind of interesting how journalists et al seemed to be searching for an appropriate ‘crazy imperator’ label to fit Qaddafi with. Shortly after his strange speech on Tuesday, Arab News picked the obvious: Watching his TV speech to the Libyan people and the world on Tuesday night, [...]
Classical Myth Course Thriving at UW-Madison
A very nice account: Each spring, for 30 years, classics professor Barry Powell led nearly 500 UW-Madison students in Classical Myth, considered a backbone course for the humanities on campus. So his views on the topic might surprise some former students. “There’s no such thing as classical myth,” says Powell. “It really doesn’t exist.” Unlike [...]
Mary Beard on Oratory
… including an interesting observation on the ‘excluding’ of females from the category of great orators: What makes a great speech? |The Guardian.
Alexander the … Vampire?
I guess it was bound to happen, what with Abe Lincoln fighting zombies and all: New Vampire Series May Leave You Hungry For More!.
What John Gruber-Miller Is Up To …
From the Daily Review Atlas: John Gruber-Miller, professor of classics at Cornell College, will deliver Monmouth College’s 27th annual Bernice L. Fox Classics Lecture on Feb. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wells Theater. Titled “Peeking into a Periegete’s Mind: Probing Pausanias’s ‘Description of Greece,’” the lecture is free and open to the public. “The [...]
The Repatriation Issue: Turkey Talks Tough
This is a rather interesting development … we’ll have to keep our eye on this to see where it goes: Turkey’s culture minister on Thursday demanded Germany return an ancient sphinx uncovered from a German archeological dig nearly a century ago or it would revoke permits for other excavations. Ertugrul Gunay told the Tagesspiegel daily [...]
Barack Obama and the Lessons of Antiquity: Kelli Rudolph
Kelli Rudolph speaks on “The Individual and the State” (the polutropos side to all this):
This Day in Ancient History: ante diem bis vi kalendas martias
ante diem bis vi kalendas martias Happy Bissextile!
Barack Obama and the Lessons of Antiquity: Charles Pazdernik
Continuing the series of talks from the Hauenstein Center, Dr Pazdernik speaks on the subject of the Fall of Empires:
This Day in Ancient History: ante diem vi kalendas martias
ante diem vi kalendas martias Regifugium — a festival which didn’t really happen on “February 24″ but actually six days before the kalends of March, which was usually during a period of intercalation. Roman writers suggested this festival was a celebration of the expulsion of the Tarquins, although modern scholars have their doubts. Whatever the [...]
Barack Obama and the Lessons of Antiquity: Walter Nicgorski
Dr Nicgorski (a professor of political science at Notre Dame) continues the conference with a paper on eloquence and Cicero:
This Day in Ancient History: ante diem viii kalendas martias
ante diem viii kalendas martias Parentalia probably comes to and end with the festival of Caristia, which was a sort of ‘kiss and make up’ festival. The idea was that people had made peace with their dead, so now it was right to bring to an end any quarrels they were having with living members [...]
Jefferson’s Books
As long as we’re talking about Greek (see next post) we might as well mention an item from Washington University in St Louis which mentions the recent identification of a number of books which once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Some excerpts: The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Washington University in St. Louis announced the discovery by [...]
Greek Turns Up in the Oddest Places!
Erstwhile Classics prof Ken Mayer sent along an interesting item last week … it’s a photo of a can of Kuang Chuan Mountain Coffee (the company is from Taiwan) and the inverted image shows that there’s some sort of Greek manuscript lurking on the label: What’s somewhat infuriating about this is that the company doesn’t [...]
Aurora Borealis Tiberii
Every now and then, it turns out the journalists get it right. An excerpt from an item in the Telegraph last week: Solar winds are plumes of electrically charged particles spewed out by the Sun that occasionally hit Earth. The planet’s protective magnetic field pushes these particles to the poles, where they react with oxygen [...]
